Sunday, April 23, 2017

Congratulations to Rolando, Vlad and Corey for earning their grey patches in Libre Fighting. The patch is not just a symbol of proficiency but more importantly the dedication and cooperation they have shown to each other in training. With the amount of material to cover and once-a-week training, they put in the extra work on their own time and holidays at the school when we can. On top of the York Muay Thai family they are already a part of, they are now a welcome member to any of the Libre Fighting chapters around the globe.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Ninja Assassin has a little something for everybody. And by that I
mean it has a several scenes where a group of army guys fight a group of ninjas. I
would suggest this movie to anybody who likes big dumb martial arts movies.
It's by no means a "good" movie. It didn't exactly get robbed at the
Oscars that year, if you catch what my dogs are barking at. It probably doesn't
have the strongest Rotten Tomatoes score. But if they made it into a TV show, I
wouldn't miss an episode. It's pretty awesome.Warning: if you think the first 5 minutes
has too many dismemberments then you probably shouldn't watch the whole thing.

Ninja Assassin (2009)

"Weakness compels strength. Betrayal begets blood. This is the law of the
Nine Clans." - Lord Ozunu

Ninja Assassin stars Korean pop star Rain as Japanese ninja assassin
Raizo who spends his off time training in his underwear in his apartment,
sharpening his throwing stars and doing handstand push-ups.The plot has
something to do with a Europol analyst, Mika, getting in over her head
investigating the existence of the Ozunu Clan, a centuries old ninja clan that hasn't updated their assassination-pricing packages, and Raizo deciding to protect
her because reasons. You see, Raizo was raised from childhood and trained to be
a ninja by the Ozunu Clan. However, he became disenfranchised when their
leader, Lord Ozunu (Sho Kosugi), had his sort-of girlfriend publicly executed
when she refused to cut a guy's face with a knife after she defeated him at
ninja sparring (as is customary at the Ozunu training centre), even though she
had already given him a pretty serious concussion. He continued to live and
train with the Clan after this, but he was really grumpy about it. He
eventually left the clan after refusing to execute an innocent criminal, an act
that offended his ninja assassin sensibilities. This eventually leads to him
fighting the clan in laundromats, warehouses, and burning buildings. Also
there's a car chase with ninjas jumping around between cars. Every word in that
last sentence should sell this movie to you.

Depicted: delicate
sensibilities.

If there's a parallel to be drawn
between our training and Ninja Assassin, it's the theme of holding your
trainers accountable. In the martial arts, the relationship between an
instructor and a student can be a powerful one, and should certainly never be
taken advantage of. Ninja Assassin illustrates this idea on a slightly different scale. I, for one, probably won't ask any of the students in
my class to commit murder, and Kru Cam likely won't command his kids class to
take revenge on the kid who decided to play soccer
for the summer. There's a pretty big difference between PCD yelling at you to
gut out the last couple push-ups, and Lord Ozunu punishing you by whipping the
bottoms of your feet when you make too much noise in a sneaking around
drill.

Train like PCD is watching you.

However, it is important to hold us
instructors accountable as martial artists, as our responsibility is to
improving our students and not to serve our own interests. We need to keep our
egos in check and never to ask our students to do anything that may be against
their principles. To be clear, I have never heard of anything like this
happening at YMT, but it's not unheard of in the martial arts for
instructors to take advantage of the trust that their students have developed
in them. This could manifest itself in different ways: financially (i.e.
ripping their students off, overcharging for "mandatory" equipment or
seminars), emotional (i.e. encouraging students to bully the "weaker"
students, using fear or intimidation to ensure "loyalty ") or even
sexually (i.e. instructors using their seniority to hit on their students,
showing preferential treatment to the students whom they find attractive, or
just generally being creepers). So the lesson to learn here is simply that your
martial arts instructors should be as accountable to you as you are to them.
For without you, they would not be instructors and without them, you would not
be students.